Charles Busch’s love affair with the movies has inspired a series of over-the-top comedies fueled equally by affection and spoofing.

At Diversionary Theatre, Busch’s latest off-Broadway hit, “The Divine Sister,” provides an evening of antic entertainment from actors eager to satisfy anyone’s curiosity about what might be going on beneath those wimpled habits — at least back in the day when nuns still wore them.

Directed with alternately campy and sentimental brio by Glenn Paris, the divine sister of the title is played by Daren Scott in something of a career breakthrough. Scott has shown growing skill in an expanding range of roles over the last 10 years. At Diversionary, he towers over everyone else and still manages to conjure condescending celluloid nuns played by such stars as Rosalind Russell, Peggy Wood, Debbie Reynolds and Anne Bancroft in films as different as “The Singing Nun” and “Agnes of God.”

Aside from the fun of identifying the many movies satirized, “The Divine Sister” has a well-made, if dizzy-making, suspenseful plot with so many twists and turns it seems impossible that the show unfolds in just 90 minutes.

Among the funniest developments in the cascade of Busch-crafted surprises is a flashback to Mother Superior’s earlier career as crime reporter Susan; she was a career gal just like Hildy Johnson in “His Girl Friday.” Scott’s Susan (now in a crisply tailored 1930s suit and hat) trades rat-a-tat overlapping dialogue with fellow reporter and soon-to-be lover Jeremy (Dangerfield G. Moore) in a scene that almost exactly mimics the energy of the Howard Hawks film. The moment’s truly divine.

Just as fabulous is Maggie Carney, in her Diversionary debut, as the wealthy atheist whose mansion Mother Superior covets for her convent, St. Veronica’s. Carney’s spot-lit monologues — renouncing God and then her own child — are ripely melodramatic in the best noir tradition. And attention must also be paid to Sister Walburga (the wonderful Jacque Wilke), the skulking German spy in the convent, whose meetings with an albino monk in the basement (also played by Moore) evoke the darkest guilty pleasures of “The DaVinci Code.”

Also on hand are the athletic Sister Acacius (Yolanda Franklin), the school’s wrestling coach with a lockerful of secrets all her own and the wacky postulant Agnes (Lauren King) whose stigmata turns out to be a pair of maraschino cherries. “The Divine Sister” is that kind of show.

Busch played Mother Superior in the work’s off-Broadway premiere in 2010, his latest drag role in a celebrated New York career, where he is best known for “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Die Mommie Die!” He scored a hit in mainstream theater as well with his 2000 Broadway production of “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” a show that had many subsequent stagings, including an oddly engrossing one here at 6th and Penn Theatre in 2005.

Such farcical satire can be tough to control, but Paris and company — designers Matt Scott (set), Corey Johnston (costumes), Blair Robert Nelson (sound), and especially Luke Olson (lighting) — visualize and pace Busch’s latest to deliver its nearly nonstop laughs, along with a few deeper pleasures.